Acer's dual-core carbon-fiber TravelMate

Acer has announced its first dual-core laptops: the TravelMate 8200 and the Aspire 5670. The TravelMate 8200, built out of carbon fiber, weighs in at 6.2 pounds, and the Aspire 5670, made out of more-standard materials, weighs 8.2 pounds. In addition to an Intel Centrino Duo T2500 processor (2MB cache, 2GHz, 667MHz FSB), the two systems each have 15.4-inch wide-screen displays, 5-in-1 memory card readers, and 1.3-megapixel videocameras. Other components include a 120GB SATA hard drive, a multiformat DVD burner, and an ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 GPU.

The lighter-weight TravelMate 8200 will cost a whopping $2,499--$300 more than Sony's new 3.5-pound VAIO SZ-series laptop, which also has a carbon-fiber case, a built-in camera, WWAN, and a Core Duo processor, along with a smaller 13.3-inch wide-screen display. The more reasonable Aspire 5670 will start at $1,299. Acer says both will be available sometime in January 2006.